Let knowledge grow from more to
more, but more of reverence in us dwell.
-- Tennyson

We are surrounded in this world by processes and
transmutations so amazing that were they not taking place around us hourly
they would be scouted as impossible imaginings.

A mind must be dull and essentially lacking in
wonderment which, without amazement, can learn for the first time that
the air we breathe, apparently so uniform in its invisible unity, is in
reality composed of two principal, and several other, gases.
The two gases, however, are but mixed as wine
may be with water, and each gas by itself is a colorless air, visually
like that mixture of the two which we call the atmosphere.

Much greater is the miracle of the composition
of water.
It is made of only two gases, one of them a
component of the air we breathe, and the other similarly invisible and
odorless, but far lighter.
These two invisible gases, when linked in a
proportion proper to their natures, fuse and are no longer ethereal and
invisible, but precipitate in a new substance water.

The waves of the sea with their thundering power,
the sparkling tides of the river buoying the ships, are but the transmuted
resultants of the union of two invisible gases.
And this, in its simplest terms, is a parable
of the infinitely complex and amazing transmutations of married love.

Ellis expresses the strange mystery of one of
the physical sides of love when he says:

What has always baffled men in the contemplation
of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy
between the necessarily circumscribed regions of mucous membrane which
is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions
to which it seems the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, 'the
mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds
all the riches of the infinite. It is a mystery before which the thinker
and theartist are alike overcome.'

To me, however, the recent discoveries of physiology
seem to afford a key which may unlock a chamber of the mystery and admitus
to one of the halls of the palace of truth.
The hormones in each individual body pour from
one organ and affect another, and thus influence the whole character of
the individual's life processes.
The visible secretions and the most subtle
essences which pass during union between man and woman, affect the livesof
each and are essentially vital to each other. As I see them, the man and
the woman are each organs, parts, of the other. And in the strictest scientific,
as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a single unit, an individual
entity.
There is a physiological as well as
a spiritual truth in the words "they
twain shall be one flesh."

In love it is not only that the yearning of the
bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the linking with another, but
that out of this union there grows a new and unprecedented creation.

In this I am not speaking of the bodily child
which springs from the love of its parents, but of the super-physical entity
created by the perfect union in love of man and woman.
Together, united by the love bonds which hold
them, they are a new and wondrous thing surpassing, and different from,
the arithmetical sum of them both when separate.

So seldom has the perfection of this new creation
been experienced, that we are still far short even of imagining its full
potentialities, but that it must have mighty powers we dimly realize.

Youths and maidens stirred by the attraction of
love, feel hauntingly and inarticulately that there is before them an immense
and beautiful experience: feel as though in union with the beloved there
will be added powers of every sort which have no measure in terms of the
ordinary unmated life.

These prophetic dreams, if they are not true of
each individual life, are yet true of the race as a whole. For in the dreams
of youth today is a foreshadowing of the reality of the future.

So accustomed have we recently become to accept
one aspect of organic evolution, that we tend to see in youth only a recapitulation
of our race s history.
The well-worn phrase "Ontogeny repeats
Phylogeny" has helped to concentrate our attention on the fact that
the young in their development, in ourselves as in the animals, go through
many phases which resemble the stages through which the whole race must
have passed in the course of its evolution.

While this is true, there is another characteristic
of youth: It is prophetic!

The dreams of youth, which each young heart expects
to see fulfilled in its own life, seem so often to fade unfulfilled.

But that is because the wonderful powers of youth
are not supplied with the necessary tool knowledge.
And so potentialities, which could have worked
miracles, are allowed to atrophy and die.

But as humanity orients itself more truly, more
and more will the knowledge and experience of the whole race be placed
at the disposal of all youth on its entry into life.

Then that glorious upspringing of the racial ideal,
which finds its expression in each unspoiled generation of youth, will
at last meet with a store of knowledge sufficient for its needs, and will
find ready as a tool to its hand the accumulated and sifted wisdom of the
race.

Then youth will be spared the blunders and the
pain and the unconscious self-destruction that today leaves scarcely anyoneuntouched.

In my own life, comparatively short and therefore
lacking in experience though it be, I have known both personally and vicariously
so much anguish that might have been prevented by knowledge.
This impels me not to wait till my experience
and researches are complete, and my life and vital interest are fading,
but to hand on at once those gleanings of wisdom I havealready accumulated
which may help the race to understand itself.
Hence I conclude this little book, for, though
incomplete, it contains some of the vital things youth should be told.

In all life activities, house-building, hunting
or any other,where intellectual and oral tradition comes in, as it does
with the human race, "instinct tends to die out."
Thus the human mother is far less able to manage
her baby without instruction than is a cat her kittens; although the human
mother at her best has, in comparison with the cat, an infinitude of duties
toward, and influences over, her child.

A similar truth holds in relation to marriage.
The century-long following of various "civilized
customs" has not only deprived our young people of most of the instinctive
knowledge they might have possessed, but has given rise to innumerable
false and polluting customs.

Though many write on the art of managing children,
few have anything to say about the art of marriage, save those who have
some dogma, often theological or subversive of natural law, to proclaim.

Any fundamental truth regarding marriage is rendered
immeasurably difficult to ascertain because of the immense ranges of variety
in human beings, even of the same race, many of which result from the artificial
conditions and the unnatural stimuli so prevalent in what we call civilization.
To attempt anything like a serious study of
marriage in all its varieties would be a monumental work.
Those who have even partially undertaken it
have tended to become entangled in a maze of abnormalities, so that the
needs of the normal, healthy, romantic person have been overlooked.

Each pair, therefore, has tended to repeat the
blunders from which it might have been saved, and to stumble blindly in
a maze of difficulties which are not the essential heritage of humanity,
but are due to the unreasoning folly of our present customs. I have written
this book for those who enter marriage normally and healthily, and with
optimism and hope. If they learn its lessons they may be saved from some
of the pitfalls in which thousands have wrecked their happiness, but they
must not think that they will thereby easily attain the perfection of marriage.

There are myriad subtleties in the adjustment
of any two individuals.
Each pair must, using the tenderest and most
delicate touches, sound and test each other, learning their way about the
intricacies of each other's hearts.

Sometimes, with all the knowledge and the best
will in the world, two who have married find that they cannot fuse their
lives; of this tragedy I have not here anything to say; but ordinary unhappiness
would be less frequent than it is were the tenderness of knowledge applied
to the problem of mutual adjustment from the first day of marriage.

All the deepest and highest forces within us impel
us to evolve an ever nobler and tenderer form of life-long monogamy as
our social ideal.
While the thoughtful and tenderhearted must
seek, with ever greater understanding, to ease and comfort those who miss
this joyful natural development, reformers in their zeal for side-issues
must not forget the main growth of the stock.
The beautiful sense for love in the hearts
of the young should be encouraged, and they should have access to the knowledge
of how to cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the clamor for freedom
to destroy it.

Disillusioned middle age is apt to look upon the
material side of the marriage relation, to see its solid surface in the
cold, dull light of everyday experience; while youth, irradiated by the
glow of its dreams, is unaware how its aerial and celestial phantasies
are broken and shattered when unsuspectingly brought up against the hard
facts of physical reality.

The transmutation of material facts by celestial
phantasies is to some extent within the power of humanity, even the imperfect
humanity of today.

When knowledge and love together go to the making
of each marriage, the joy of that new unit, the pair will reach from the
physical foundations of its bodies to the heavens where its head is crowned
with stars.

[Ed. Note This completes the main
body of Married Love by Marie Stopes.]

NOTE 2 - A frequent mistake (made even
by gynaecologists) is to confuse menstruation with the "period of
desire" which is generally called "heat" in animals. Even
in the most authoritative recent textbooks, such phrases as "heat"
and menstruation are very common, thus coupling heat and menstruation as
though they were equivalents, while the older books quite explicitly look
on the menstrual period in women as corresponding to desire or "heat"
in animals. This error has even been repeated very recently in the Proceedings
of the Royal Society of Medicine.

(MCS postscript inserted here instead of bottom
of page for clarity: Dr. Raymond Crawfurd's mistaken statement that the
identity of oestrus, or "heat" in the lower animals and of menstruation
in the human female, admits of no doubt. Proc. Roy. Soc. Medicine,
vol. 9, 1916, p. 62.)

Some physiologists have studied this subject in
several of the higher animals, and now realize that the time of desire
is physiologically distinct from the phase which is represented by menstruation
in women.
It seems to be fairly well established that
in women menstruation is caused by an internal secretion of the ovaries
and is not directly due to ovulation, though it must have some connection
with it.

(Postscript inserted here: The best modern
account of these complex subjects will be found in the advanced text-book
The Physiology of Reproduction, pp. xvii., 706, by F. H. A. Marshall.
Reference may be made to original papers by I. Beard in the Anat. Anzeiger
for 1897; and by Heape in the Philosophical Trans. Royal Society,
1894, 97.)

The most that modern science appears to have attained
is briefly summarized in the following quotation from Marshall (The
Physiology of Reproduction, p. 69):

According to Martin and certain other writers,
the human female often experiences a distinct post-menstrual oestrus (MCS
Postscript inserted here: Modern research has recognized a period when
the female animal is ready for impregnation, which is called the oestrus,
and a preparatory series of physiological changes called the pro-estrous
phase.) at which sexual desire is greater
than at other times; so that, although conception can occur throughout
the inter-menstrual period, it would seem probable that originally coition
was restricted to definite periods of oestrus following menstrual or pro-estrous
periods in women, as in females of other mammalia. On this point Heape
writes as follows: "This special time for oestrus in the human female
has very frequently been denied, and, no doubt, modern civilization and
modern social life do much to check the natural sexual instinct where there
is undue strain on the constitution, or to stimulate it at other times
where extreme vigor is the result. For these reasons a definite period
of cestrus may readily be interfered with, but the instinct is, I am convinced,
still marked.

In nearly all wild animals there is a definite
period for sexual excitement, very commonly just at that time of the year
which fits into the span of gestation, so that the young are born at the
season which gives them the best chance to grow up.
In animals the period of desire, the ovulation
(or setting free of the female germ or unfertilized egg-cell) and the time
of the birth of the young, are all co-related harmoniously.
The male animal is only allowed to approach
the female when the natural longing for union is upon her. Among human
beings, the only race which seems to have long periods of sexual quiescence
at all comparable with those natural to the animals are the Esquimaux,
who appear to pass many months without any unions of the men and women.

[THE END of Marie Stopes' Married
Love, published 1918 - considered by most impartial authorities as one
of the most important books of the 20th century. Since it was written by
a woman for the eventual benefit of women, it has been all but erased from
modern reviews.]

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